Bitcoin Trader’s Operations Deemed Illegal; Faces 30 Months in Prison

Theresa Tetley is a fifty year old local bitcoin trader in LA and she faces 30 months in prison for operation an illegal money transmitting business.

Tetley, better known as the “Bitcoin Maven,” has been trading bitcoin on Localbitcoins.com since 2014 and has made around $300,000 in just three years. Some transactions have amounted to as much as $9.5 million.

The Bitcoin Maven was found guilty for operating an “unregistered money transmission business.” Tetley will face a 30-month sentence in federal jail but her defense lawyers will be fighting for a less grave sentence of just one year.

According to court documents, Tetley’s illegal bitcoin trading had “fueled a black-market financial system in the Central District of California that purposely and deliberately existed outside of the regulated bank industry.”

This is not the first case of illegal bitcoin trading in the US. Just last year a bitcoin trader in Detroit was also caught and sentenced to 366 days in prison.

While the case is thought to the first of its kind in Southern California, according to NBC LA, other bitcoin traders have run afoul of authorities in other parts of U.S. in the last year.